Make interactive ebooks
Use Apple’s free iBooks Author tool to create rich ebooks
Apple’s iBooks platform is fantastic for digital publishing, and its iBooks Author app is a powerful and surprisingly easy tool for creating beautiful interactive books. Rather than basic Kindle-style ebooks, iBooks Author lets you create proper page layouts with beautiful typography, and enhance the pages with a range of interactive media features. It’s free, and so is publishing to the iBooks Store. You can keep your creations to yourself, but why not share them with the world?
iBooks Author will feel familiar to anyone who’s used Pages, Keynote or even Numbers. In fact, you can even import Pages and Keynote documents directly into an iBooks document. But before you begin, sketch out a plan. Seriously, get a pencil and paper and scribble out your ideas, then gather your media: photos, movie files, audio clips, and any writing you’ve done.
The structure of an iBook is quite straightforward. Everything is arranged in chapters, each chapter has one or more sections, and each section can have one or more pages. Every one of these – chapters, sections and pages – can be set to use one of a range of ready-made templates. For pages, you can start with blank ones and build things yourself if you prefer, to make your own templates. It’s a fairly foolproof system, as long as you work with it rather than against it.
What makes iBooks Author really interesting are its “widgets.” These are ways of adding more interactive content to your pages, from slideshows and movies to multiple-choice quizzes, embedded Keynote presentations, and even custom HTML content. Widgets can be played “inline” in the layout or set to open fullscreen, hiding the rest of the page as they do. The one point to remember is that they show a preview image until they’re touched, and only then become active.
If you want more than the standard set of widgets, take a look at bookry.com and
bookwidgets.com. Both sites have extensive libraries of widgets, many of them free.